[Flightgear-devel] Cessna 337G Skymaster Autopilot

[<ric...@gm...>]

The Cessna 337 was developed by pavel Cueto (El Flauta) and Fernando Espinosa and is a superb aircraft: detailed exterior model and cockpit. They just never finished the autopilot and there have been no commits for over a year. The autopilot is a Navomatic 400A, which is not unlike the Century III as found in the Piper Comanche and Seneca II. I've taken their 3D model and got the controls working, created a dialog for it and written the autopilot code. I've also fixed a couple of minor bugs unrelated to the autopilot.

My question is, how do I get this into Flightgear? I know about gitorious and merge requests but who decides whether the changes should go? Who is the maintainer when the original authors are inactive? I've sent El Flauta a PM via the forum but he doesn't seem to visit much these days.

Ideally what I'd like to do is put a thread on the forum and get some people to test it out but I don't want to step on any toes if there is an active maintainer.

The other twist is that this Navomatic autopilot should really be out of the aircraft itself and made generic. I've written the code to support that but that would mean an addition to Aircraft/Instruments as well as changes to Aircraft/Cessna337.

Once I have finished this, I will probably look at fixing up some other similar aircraft with no active maintainer, e.g. the autopilot and some of the missing instruments in the Piper Aerostar, which is a Syd Adams aircraft.

Any advice?

Richard Senior
sanhozay